We discussed at the first Ubiquity planning meeting that we need to come up with and implement a security model for the next release, so I thought I’d write down a few thoughts I’ve been having about it. I don’t consider myself a security expert by any stretch of the imagination, though, so any suggestions or corrections are more than welcome. Firstly, as noted in the meeting notes, the notion of a security model being discussed here is separate from, but supporting of, the kind of social “web of trust” based model that I’ve written about before. ... Read more

Last night we held a really fun Labs Night at Mozilla’s Building K in Mountain View, California. The Thunderbird team was here for their work week, some folks from Seedcamp dropped in, and Dion and Ben of the Ajaxian and the new Mozilla Developer Tools Lab were all here, which made for a night of innovative presentations that got lots of interesting conversations started. The evening started out with Jono presenting a quick overview of all the currently active Labs projects while wearing a large sombrero. ... Read more

As some people know, it’s possible to get the latest news about our favorite sites on a single page through a fairly ubiquitous technology called web syndication. The advantage of this is that we can look at all the news we want in a single place, instead of having to visit dozens of websites per day. Unfortunately, actually setting up web syndication can be a chore—and often, a confusing one at that. ... Read more

I recently spent time making Parchment work properly on my new iPhone 3G. The iPhone has been my first foray into the world of the mobile web, and getting Parchment to work well on it was an interesting experience. Some of the challenges I faced involved getting the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard to display properly—Parchment doesn’t actually have any text input fields on it, so by default the iPhone didn’t think that users had to enter text—and modifying some processor-intensive JavaScript code so that the iPhone didn’t think that Parchment had gone into an infinite loop. ... Read more

In my recent post on Trusting Functionality I alluded to a socially-based framework for trust that would allow software to be generative and safe at the same time. When trying to figure out a solution to this problem, I realized that there are already communities on the internet that have built-in social mechanisms for trust. Python, for example, is a language notorious for its lack of protection against untrusted code. Yet we don’t see much concern that a Python script may contain malicious code, even though it has the ability to do whatever it wants to our computer. ... Read more

Over the past few days my friends Ben Collins-Sussman and Jim Blandy and I have been having an interesting conversation about the use of Mercurial for development collaboration. Eventually one of my email responses got so long-winded that I figured it’d be best to make the conversation public. So, here’s my take on Mercurial, and some reasons for why a HG birds-of-a-feather session at the Mozilla Summit coming up next week would be very useful for me. ... Read more

One of the major challenges we face with the design of our new linguistic command-line project is that of trust. As Zittrain mentions in The Future of the Internet, this is really the fundamental problem of generative systems, and also their most valuable asset: the ability for a user to run arbitrary code is simultaneously what gives the personal computer its revolutionary power, but it’s also its greatest vulnerability. At present, because our project is still in the prototyping stage, we’re opting for freedom of expressiveness and experimentation over security. ... Read more

A few weeks ago, Oxford University professor Jonathan Zittrain recommended Firefox 3 on The Colbert Report. While getting the bump for the browser from this great show was certainly a win for Mozilla, more provocative was the new book Zittrain was discussing with Colbert, entitled The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Contrary to the Luddism I’d assumed the book’s title implied—e.g., that the Internet is a terrible thing and needs to be dismantled—Zittrain instead celebrates how open and positive the Internet and personal computing have been for us, but warns that this liberating period is in danger of coming to a close. ... Read more

Last week, Scott Petersen from Adobe gave a talk at Mozilla on a toolchain he’s been creating—soon to be open-sourced—that allows C code to be targeted to the Tamarin virtual machine. Aside from being a really interesting piece of technology, I thought its implications for the web were pretty impressive. Before reading this post, readers who aren’t familiar with Tamarin may want to read Frank Hecker’s excellent Adobe, Mozilla, and Tamarin post from 2006 for some background on its goals and why it’s relevant to Mozilla and the open-source community in general. ... Read more

Yesterday I tried learning Inform 7. I’m not sure how I feel about the documentation for this language; on the one hand, like its predecessor, the DM4 for Inform 6, it’s extremely thorough and well-written. On the other hand, one aspect of the DM4 that made it among my favorite programming books—perhaps one of my favorite books, period—was its exercises, which made experiencing the book fairly interactive. The act of reading a relatively short amount of text and then putting one’s newly-found knowledge to use in the solving of a difficult problem not only helped reinforce the knowledge for me, but it was also fun. ... Read more